HP Advances Virtual Application Networking Vision

At Interop Las Vergas conference last week, HP unveiled its vision for virtual application networks (VAN) that will reduce reliance on the CLI and usher in a new era for network administration.

In a keynote address, Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager, HP Networking, said that in traditional networks it takes a lot of steps to deploy apps and lots of CLI entries. Use of CLI also has an impact on performance, according to Mayer, with 70 percent of data center errors due to CLI configuration issues.

"CLI makes it difficult to roll things out quickly," Mayer said. "If you can't deploy quickly your users will go there without you."

Mayer added that the network today doesn't know what apps are running on it and are somewhat indifferent to them.

"HP's vision for software defined networking is to get you away from managing infrastructure and more towards connecting users to applications," Mayer said.

Kash Shaikh, director of Marketing, HP Networking, explained to Enterprise Networking Planet that the VAN makes the network programmable from end-to-end with a control-plane concept. The idea is to take the same concepts of hardware abstraction that have become the norm in the world of server virtualization.

The way the management will work is with a new VAN module for HP's Intelligent Management Center (IMC) system. The module provides a template-based configuration that has a designer to create preconfigured templates that are available to the system administrator and as plug-in in VMware vCenter. The template is an approach to enable an application to be deployed to the network

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